The level of media bias in reporting the Democratic National Convention is as high as I have ever seen outside of North Korea and the old Soviet bloc. The GOP convention was declared a disaster many times during its four-day run, but the DNC, reeling from revelations of the rigging of the primary contests, is getting far more benign descriptors, as the media avert their eyes from unpleasant realities.

Among the most unpleasant realities for Democrats and the media is the anger of Bernie supporters now that it is clear the campaign into which they threw their hearts and souls was fixed all along. Somehow, that anger must be minimized, trivialized, and eventually extinguished if Donald Trump is to be stopped. And in the eyes of the media, that threat is so overwhelming that no restraints whatsoever are justified in making the case against him as propagandists rather than honest observers and reporters.

So the focus last night at the DNC was “history being made,” (no Y chromosomes at the top of the ticket) and a soft focus look at Hillary’s record as a left wing activist using children as a front for demanding leftist policies and selected aspects of her personal relationship with Bill Clinton, the most popular living Democrat (if you ask Democrats).

Yesterday, when an Afghan migrant and Islamic State devotee in Germany began attacking commuters on a busy train, he was quickly shot and killed by security. Similarly, the horrific truck attack last week in Nice was only brought to an end when the French police shot and killed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who also appears to have been linked with ISIS.

When comparable knife attacks and car rammings have happened in Israel, security forces there acted similarly. Of course, on many occasions, Israel’s border police and army have managed to shoot and merely disable assailants. But when that has not been possible, Palestinian attackers have been shot and killed in an effort to save the lives of Israeli civilians in immediate harm’s way. It would seem morally obvious that sometimes this is what has to be done to bring a terror assault to the swiftest possible conclusion.

Yet Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom had an objection to Israelis defending themselves in this way. In January, when allegations were made in the Swedish parliament that Israel was perpetrating “extrajudicial executions” of Palestinian attackers, Wallstrom gave credence to these allegations. “It is vital that there is a thorough, credible investigation into these deaths in order to clarify and bring about possible accountability,” she said. By the same standard, we should now expect to hear Sweden’s foreign ministry call upon their French and German neighbors to undertake investigations into the circumstances under which the German train and Nice attackers were killed.

Wallstrom’s talk of bringing about “possible accountability” is especially galling. The notion that it is members of Israel’s security forces who should be interrogated and punished for acting to neutralize a terror threat is an unspeakable moral inversion. But, of course, in the event that there was serious reason to believe that wrongdoing had been committed by a member of the security services then that would be a legal matter.

Following last week’s terror attack in Nice, a Belgian Jewish organization issued a highly unusual statement charging that, had European media not spent months “ignoring” Palestinian terror against Israel out of “political correctness,” the idea of a truck being used as a weapon wouldn’t have come as such a shock. But it now turns out that European officials did something much worse than merely ignoring Palestinian attacks: They issued a 39-page report, signed by almost every EU country, blaming these attacks on “the occupation” rather than the terrorists. The obvious corollary was that European countries had no reason to fear similar attacks and, therefore, they didn’t bother taking precautions that could have greatly reduced the casualties.

The most shocking part of the Nice attack was how high those casualties were: The truck driver managed to kill 84 people before he was stopped. By comparison, as the New York Times reported on Monday, Israel has suffered at least 32 car-ramming attacks since last October, yet all these attacks combined have killed exactly two people (shootings and stabbings are much deadlier). Granted, most involved private cars, but even attacks using buses or heavy construction vehicles never approached the scale of Nice’s casualties. The deadliest ramming attack in Israel’s history, in 2001, killed eight.

(…)

Now consider the abovementioned EU document, first reported in the EUobserver last Friday, and its implications for both those counterterrorism techniques. The document is an internal assessment of the wave of Palestinian terror that began last October, written by EU diplomats in the region and endorsed in December 2015 by all EU countries with “embassies in Jerusalem and Ramallah,” the EUobserver said.

And what did it conclude? That the attacks were due to “the Israeli occupation… and a long-standing policy of political, economic and social marginalisation of Palestinians in Jerusalem,” to “deep frustration amongst Palestinians over the effects of the occupation, and a lack of hope that a negotiated solution can bring it to an end.” This, the report asserted, was “the heart of the matter”; factors like rampant Palestinian incitement and widespread Islamist sentiment, if they were mentioned at all, were evidently dismissed as unimportant.

The report’s first implication is obvious: If Palestinian attacks stem primarily from “the occupation,” there’s no reason to think anything similar could happen in Europe, which isn’t occupying anyone (at least in its own view; Islamists might not agree). Consequently, there’s also no need to learn from Israel’s methods of dealing with such attacks.

In contrast, had EU diplomats understood the major role played by Palestinian incitement—for instance, the endless Internet memes urging Palestinians to stab, run over and otherwise kill Jews, complete with detailed instructions on how to do so—they might have realized that similar propaganda put out by Islamic State, urging people to use similar techniques against Westerners, could have a similar effect. Had they understood the role played by Islamist sentiments—fully 89 percent of Palestinians supported a Sharia-based state in a Pew poll last year, one of the highest rates in the world—they might have realized that similar sentiments among some European Muslims posed a similar threat. And had they realized all this, the crowds in Nice might not have been left virtually unprotected.

No less telling, however, was the report’s explanation for Israel’s relatively low death toll. Rather than crediting the Israeli police for managing to stop most of the attacks quickly, before they had claimed many victims, it accused them of “excessive use of force… possibly amounting in certain cases to unlawful killings.”

If the EU’s consensus position is that shooting terrorists in mid-rampage constitutes “excessive use of force,” European policemen may understandably hesitate to do the same. In Nice, for instance, the rampage continued for two kilometers while policemen reportedly “ran 200 meters behind the truck trying to stop it”; the police caught up only when a civilian jumped into the truck’s cab and wrestled the driver, slowing him down. Yet even then, an eyewitness said, “They kept yelling at him and when he did not step out – they saw him from the window taking his gun out.” Only then did they open fire.

Through the last 18 months of jihadist terror in France, a simple pattern is emerging: it keeps getting worse. If the January 2015 attacks were aimed at specific groups – Jews and blasphemers – the November follow-up was more indiscriminate. At the Bataclan and at the cafes the Islamists killed young adults, out being European hedonists. This time, it’s gone a step further. In Nice, it is the people at large – families and groups of friends – doing nothing more provocative than attending a national celebration. Ten children were among the dead.

In 1971 then New YorkTimes columnist James Reston had his appendix removed at a hospital in China. The article he wrote about his experience still reverberates today. His doctors used a standard set of injectable drugs—lidocaine and benzocaine—to anesthetize him before surgery, he explained. But they controlled his postoperative pain with something quite different: a Chinese medical practice known as acupuncture, which involved sticking tiny needles into his skin at very specific locations and gently twisting them. According to Reston, it worked.

Readers back home were fascinated. In a rush of excitement over this new, exotic knowledge, the original story was quickly jumbled. Before long, it was commonly believed that the Chinese doctors had used acupuncture not just after Reston’s appendectomy but as anesthesia for the surgery itself. Interest in acupuncture soared in the U.S. and has remained high ever since.

But it turned out that acupuncture as Reston described it was not the enduring bit of ancient Chinese wisdom enthusiasts supposed. In fact, the procedure had been written off as superstition back in the 1600s and abandoned altogether in favor of a more science-based approach to healing by the 1800s. Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong had only revived acupuncture in the 1950s as part of his initiative to convince the Chinese people that their government had a plan for keeping them healthy despite a woeful dearth of financial and medical resources.

Even more impressive than how well Mao’s campaign worked in China at the time is how well it is working in the U.S. today. Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo acupuncture for conditions ranging from pain to post-traumatic stress disorder, and the federal government spends tens of millions of dollars to study the protocol.

So far that research has been disappointing. Studies have found no meaningful difference between acupuncture and a wide range of sham treatments. Whether investigators penetrate the skin or not, use needles or toothpicks, target the particular locations on the body cited by acupuncturists or random ones, the same proportion of patients experience more or less the same degree of pain relief (the most common condition for which acupuncture is administered and the most well researched). “We have no evidence that [acupuncture] is anything more than theatrical placebo,” says Harriet Hall, a retired family physician and U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who has studied, and long been a critic of, alternative medicine.

Unfortunately, similar attacks on Christians are rarely recounted, although ISIS has made its intentions clear: “the Christian community… “will not have safety, even in your dreams, until you embrace Islam. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women….”

Certainly Islamist radicals have not ignored this proclamation, even though accounts of their successful efforts may be hard to come by.

Only a scouring of Catholic news reports exposes an ongoing litany of desecration, arson and abuse. For example, a recent newsletter from Federation for Europa Christiana recounts (in French) the following:

“At Martigues…three successive attacks in May 2016: first the pastor extinguished a malicious fire on the altar of the church of the Madeleine. This same priest was later attacked and his eye was blackened….

“Then, at the Saint-Genest church, the same priest discovered the open tabernacle and communion wafers thrown to the ground…

“In April, 2016, all the crucifixes and crosses were shattered at the cemetery of La Chapelle-du-Bard….”

All told, 810 attacks on French Christian places of worship and Christian cemeteries took place in 2015.

“In recent weeks, Catholics in France and Belgium — countries still recovering from brutal ISIS attacks — have been hit with numerous acts of violence and aggression, including fires set in churches, an assault on a priest, the desecration of a tabernacle.

“More than 100 Catholic websites… of churches and congregations were hacked by suspected Tunisian cyber-jihadists who call themselves the Fallaga Team.”

On Saturday, ahead of today’s holiday dedicated to Archangel Gabriel, a group of Serbs came under fire from automatic weapons as they were cleaning the grounds of the garbage and debris that local ethnic Albanians are dumping at the ruins of the desecrated temple. Nobody was injured during the incident, that has been reported to the Kosovo police.

Today, about 100 villagers and their guests from various parts of the Kosovsko Pomoravlje District, along with some citizens who had left the area as early as in the 1970s, gathered at the monastery and celebrated the day in peace, and without incidents.

“Visiting my hometown brings back beautiful childhood memories, but scenes like the desecrated grave of my former neighbor - which was done during the past year - point out to the reality and the difficult lives that people who remained are leading.” Mijomir Lalic, who now lives in the town of Smederevo, told Serbia’s state broadcaster RTS.

Nenad Kojic, a professor at the Pristina University, now relocated to Kosovska Mitrovica, said those who live in the village now “have no intention of leaving.”

“It’s all the same that they destroyed our holy places, they cannot destroy our faith and our hope,” said Kojic.

The Binac monastery, dedicated to Archangel Gabriel, is one of the oldest Serbian temples built in the 14th century. It was completely destroyed in July 1999, after the war in Kosovo and after the arrival of international forces there.

Since late May, Christians in Egypt have been the victims of at least a dozen sectarian attacks, and activists and politicians say the government has done little to stop it, despite Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s early overtures to the Coptic community and their staunch support of him.

“It is escalating in a very short time,” said Mina Thabet, programme director for minorities and vulnerable groups with the Egyptian Commission of Rights and Freedoms.

Among the assaults was one in late May on an elderly Coptic woman in Minya, who was stripped, beaten and paraded naked because of a rumour that her son was having a relationship with a Muslim woman. Seven homes in the town were set ablaze.

Victims said the police response was late and insufficient.

Sectarian tensions heated up even more on June 30, three years to the day after the beginning of the protests that led to the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, when a Coptic priest was gunned down in Al Arish, North Sinai in an attack claimed by the IS group. The group accused the priest of “waging a war against Islam”.

As gruesome as that attack was, the majority of the incidents have not taken place in the IS stronghold in northern Sinai, but in the Governorate of Minya, which is nestled along the Nile river about 250 kilometres south of Cairo.

(…)

Hours before the priest in Al Arish was shot, the under-construction house of a Coptic man in Minya was torched by a mob who thought he was building a church – despite his having signed an affidavit in the presence of police, the mayor and the local sheikh saying the structure would be a residence and would be used for no other purpose. The four adjacent homes, which belonged to his brothers, were also burned.

The building of churches is a flashpoint for sectarian tensions in Egypt. Per capita, there are far fewer churches serving the Christian community than there are mosques serving the Muslim community, and the building of new churches is strictly restricted under Egyptian law and requires special permissions. Christians for decades have had difficulty obtaining the necessary approvals and often face fierce opposition from Muslim neighbors.

While the recent violence has been concentrated in and around Minya, other Christian strongholds in the country have suffered as well. For example, an attack occurred on July 2 in the governorate of Sohag, which is about 500km south of Cairo and also has a large Christian population, when the teenage daughter of a priest was grabbed from behind by the hair and stabbed in the neck in what appeared to be a failed attempt to slit her throat. She was rescued by a bystander and survived the attack.

A crew from The Daily Show — which plunged in the ratings after Trevor Noah took over as host— set up outside the event and approached people as they left the party, asking them for interviews.

At 12:30 a.m., Pollak was leaving the party when The Daily Show approached. “I was on the phone anyway,” Pollak recalled, “so I ignored them, but then I saw them pulling someone aside, so I stopped to watch.” The Breitbart senior editor-at-large ended his call, and turned on his video camera.

The Daily Show didn’t like that. Their attempt to stop Pollak wasn’t funny, and included physical intimidation and a blatant disregard for the First Amendment.

“I wanted to shoot raw footage of their interview with a young, gay conservative, because I wanted to compare it to their final cut and see whether they had been fair to him,” Pollak recalled.

“I didn’t want this person to be humiliated merely for being gay and having the ‘wrong’ political views,” Pollak added.

“They told me not to film, then they told me —incorrectly — that I couldn’t film them, and then one of their reporters pushed me. Finally, they gave up, packed up their cameras and ran away.”

(…)

The actions of the thugs from The Daily Show are shocking, and they rip the lid off the real purpose off the show: political propaganda disguised as entertainment. They weren’t trying to hide their “jokes” but were trying to keep their dwindling viewership from seeing how they make the sausage.

It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11.

The Democratic Party was out of ideas. The politicians who would become some of Bush’s most fevered critics were still following the president’s cues. A newly serious America was confronting a world war.

Stewart’s disingenuousness, veering from ironic detachment to self-righteous hectoring, undermined real sincerity with fake sincerity. The Daily Show’s audience of hipster yuppies cheered their newfound faith in sincere cynicism while the calculated ironic distance of his comedy kept him safe from critics. Even while he attacked the media’s dishonesty, his own routine was the most dishonest of them all.

His fake news was real news, biased and spun with punch lines. It was fake news that was real and just as fake as the rest of the news. The truth was that the lie was still a lie.

What Stewart offered a party dragged down by a morose Gore and Kerry was the promise of cool. Their former figurehead had started out playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show only to decay into a bloated red-faced mess. With towers burning and wars rising, Stewart was to be their bridge to a cooler and younger 21st century that an aging Democratic Party no longer seemed able to grapple with.

Jon Stewart didn’t actually have cool, but he could offer it up inversely by way of mockery. Like a school paper’s drama critic, he might not be cool, but by railing against others, he could deny coolness to them.

(…)

What Stewart offered Democrats was an evasive viewpoint without accountability. And nothing quite appeals to the cowardly instincts of a political hack like being able to take a political position without being held accountable for it. But it was Obama who truly embraced politics without accountability, transforming every issue into a joke or referencing it back to his own biography.

While he may have come out on the stage with a unique personal story, what kept Obama competitive was his skill at refracting everything through layers of irony and self-awareness. His approach was to borrow Stewart’s own routine without any of its ambiguity. Stewart’s pretense of triangulation became Obama’s obsession with turning his radical left-wing politics into an imaginary middle ground.

Stewart and Obama had come out of a political movement trying to respond to September 11 without having the first idea how to do so. Stewart’s comedy paved the way for minimizing the threat while inflating the absurdity of those trying to fight it. It is an approach that Obama continues to embrace.

(…)

Generation X cynicism fused with millennial brand awareness to create a political monster who might not be able to lie to the people all the time, but who cynically made the existence of his lies irrelevant.

Stewart’s Daily Show had offered an antidote to the Bush era of patriotism, sincerity and decency. Its antidote was passive aggressive ridicule and political satire as sincerity. After the Bush era ended, Stewart and his fellow comedians had little left to do except take on the job of defending Obama, while occasionally critiquing him. They had become the official court jesters of the Democratic Party.

Stewart: “Both sides are engaging in aerial bombardment, but one side appears to be bomb-better-at it. (Studio laughter at the wordplay.) Most Hamas rockets are neutralized by Israel’s Iron Dome technology, and Israeli citizens can even now download a warning app. (Cut to clip of Israel’s US ambassador Ron Dermer explaining how Israelis can know where and when they’re being attacked.) So Israelis seem to have a high-tech, smart-phone alert system.”

Let me see if I understand the point he’s making here: Having falsely implied that Israel is as keen on killing as Hamas is, Stewart now seems to be criticizing Israel for not being as vulnerable as Hamas would like it to be to those Hamas rockets that are sent to kill us. He seems to be bashing us for having those tech smarts. It’s a bad thing that we developed a unique, astonishing Iron Dome missile defense system, without which hundreds of us would be dead? It’s a bad thing that we developed an app to warn us that the rockets designed to kill our citizens are heading this way?

Stewart: “How are the Gazans notified? (Cut to a clip explaining that Israel carries out “a small mortar explosion” on the roof of a building that is to be bombed “which serves as an Israeli warning of an upcoming airstrike.” Back to Stewart.) “Hmmm. So the Israeli military warns Gaza residents of imminent bombing (pause for comedic effect), with a smaller warning bombing! (Laughter). An amuse-boom, if you will.” (Studio laughter, clapping, cheering.)

What’s my problem with that bit (once I’ve registered the witty play on amuse-bouche). Oh, where to start? Stewart fails to explain which buildings in Gaza are being targeted: This is not the mirror image of Hamas’s arbitrary rocket attacks on any and every Israeli target. These are Israeli airstrikes on Gaza homes where Israel says terror chiefs live, where weaponry is stored, from where rockets are fired.

Furthermore, whereas Hamas, out to kill, does not generally warn Israel of imminent rocket attacks (thus rendering every missile fired at Israel from Gaza “a crime against humanity,” according to the Palestinian Authority’s own UN representative), Israel, trying not to kill noncombatants, fires that warning mortar shell to alert civilians — even though it knows this is more than likely to lead to the terrorist fleeing. Would Stewart rather Israel not warn Gazans that, in its efforts to prevent rocket fire on its civilians, it is about to strike back?

Mr. Juncker insisted that however bad the “migrant crisis” and terrorism in Europe gets, the EU will never call into question the free movement of people within the bloc.

“This is one of the four fundamental freedoms of the founding Treaty of Rome. It is an inviolable principle,” he said.

(…)

Dismissing suggestions that open borders led to the attacks, Mr. Juncker said he believed “exactly the opposite” – that the attacks should be met with a stronger display of liberal values including open borders.

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed.

In the late 1990’s, while Huma Abedin was interning in the Bill Clinton White House and began her long association with Hillary Clinton, she served as an executive board member of George Washington University’s Muslim Students Association. Huma Abedin also worked at the aforementioned Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.

Huma Abedin, who was raised in Saudi Arabia during her formative years and was exposed to Saudi Wahhabist ideology, gravitated to Islamist organizations with ties to radical Saudi entities when she returned to the United States as a young adult.

Years later, with the prospect of an influential White House position side by side with her patron Hillary Clinton in sight, Huma Abedin still puts Islamist interests first. Evidence that the “Muslim Minority Agenda” espoused by the journal she once worked for is still her key priority is a video of Huma Abedin advocating unlimited admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. She said that “we cannot turn these people away.”

Huma Abedin has operated within the same network revealed in the Congressional Joint Inquiry Report. She will be a carrier of “civilization jihad” into the inner circle of the White House if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

…both Huma and Hillary have a lot of explaining to do about Saudi Arabia, the big money that the Kingdom has given to the Clintons, and why Hillary knew the Saudis were funding terrorism and didn’t do anything about it. The public will have questions about Saudi Arabian-raised Huma Abedin, a woman who I’ve already said I believe is a Saudi plant.

If our media even TRIED to do their job and tell citizens the truth, the 28 Pages would sink Hillary Clinton faster than Ted Kennedy’s car sank in the dark waters of Chappaquiddick one July night.

An issue like the Saudi influence on the government and the Kingdom’s support for terrorism is where Donald Trump’s populism comes into all its glory. I don’t care whether you’re a staunch conservative or proud progressive, almost nobody likes or trusts Saudi Arabia. Everyone knows that the Saudis are out for themselves and are our “ally” in the same way a scorpion is an ally to a frog when it needs to get across the river.

The 28 Pages report confirms this in a section that’s title says it all: Lack of Cooperation in Counterterrorism Investigations.

The problem has been that Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all been in Saudi Arabia’s pocket. (Do those bedsheets they wear even have pockets? I’m a fashion expert, so I SHOULD know these things!)

When you have an issue with the political elites of both parties on one side and most of the American people on the other, it’s exactly why Donald J. Trump is the ideal man for his time.

Hillary and Huma won’t be able to avoid questions — like the three questions I said Hillary must answer about Huma — forever. It’s a time for answers.

By any definition, Trump is not a classical populist. His traction derives from opposing unchecked and cynical illegal immigration, not diverse and measured legal immigration. And he is rebelling not so much against a flabby, sclerotic status quo as against a radical, even revolutionary regime of elites who are now well beyond accustomed norms. It is hardly radical to oppose the Confederate doctrine of legal nullification in more than 300 sanctuary cities, or a de facto open border with Mexico, or doubling the national debt in eight years, or ruining the nation’s health-care system with the most radical reconstruction in the history of American health-care policy, or systematically running huge trade deficits with an autocratic China that does not adhere to international norms of free trade and predicates expanding political and military power in the South China Sea on its commercial mercantilism. Trump seemed incendiary in the primaries, but as he is juxtaposed to the official Clinton extremist agenda, he will likely be reinterpreted increasingly as more mainstream — a probability enhanced by his selection of Mike Pence as his running-mate.

The whole Clinton email affair and subsequent preferential treatment was viewed very negatively by the American people. According to a ABC News/Washington poll, 56% of the American people disagreed with Comey’s decision not to charge Clinton, while only 35% expressed support.

The American people know preferential treatment when they see it and in this situation it was clear that Hillary’s political influence was a major factor in the Department of Justice decision. It reminded the public of the double standard of justice that exists in our country, a condition that is anathema to Americans who care about fairness in our criminal justice system.

Not surprisingly, Hillary’s already low ratings for trustworthiness and honesty plummeted. The result was that Hillary’s national poll numbers versus Trump started to drop significantly. In the latest Rasmussen poll, Trump received a new high of 44%, with a strong 7% edge over Clinton. He is also leading in the latest LA Times poll by a 43-40% margin and is tied with Clinton in the most recent New York Times poll. Most importantly, in the new Quinnipiac University battleground state polls, Trump enjoyed a slight lead over Clinton in the key swing states of Florida and Ohio and was tied with Clinton in Pennsylvania, a state Republicans have not won 1988.

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama’s remedies proved worse than the original illness.

Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America’s strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word “terrorism,” was airbrushed from the new administration’s vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence.”

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama’s outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic “violent extremism.”

(…)

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants — even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.

Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil — even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America’s lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East.

Sunday on Fox News Channel’s breaking news coverage of the shootings in Baton Rouge, LA that has killed 3 officers and injured 3 more, Cleveland police officer and Police Patrolmen’s Association President Steve Loomis said President Barack Obama had “blood on his hands.”

Loomis said, “The president of the Untied States validated a false narrative and the nonsense that Black Lives Matter and the Media are pressing out to the public — validated with his very divisive statements And now we see an escalation.

I New York råbte demonstranter for et par uger siden “What do we want? Dead Cops!”

Turkey faces a perfect storm of economic, political and foreign policy problems.

First, Turkey’s much-heralded economic growth spurt of the 2000’s has come to a grinding stop. The Erdogan boom, which inspired predictions that Turkey might emerge as another China, resembled the Asian experience less than it did the Latin American credidt bubbles of the 1980s or the American subprime bubble of the 2000s.

(…)

Secondly, Turkey’s internal cohesion is at risk due to the rapid increase of its Kurdish-speaking minority and the relative decline of the ethnic Turkish population.

The Kurdish demographic problem has led Erdogan into a political swamp from which he may not emerge. He won last year’s presidential election by stirring up national ardor against the Kurdish minority, and has kept the Kurdish southeast of the country in a low-level civil war since then. The leader of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party warned last March that Erdogan had brought Turkey to the brink of an ethnic war.

To prevent the Syrian Kurds from controlling the northern border of their country and linking up with their Iraqi compatriots, Erdogan covertly supported Sunni terrorists, including ISIS, as Michael Rubin explained last March in Newsweek. Erdogan’s back channel to ISIS blew up in Turkey’s face–literally–when ISIS suicide bombers killed 42 people and injured hundreds at the Istanbul Airport June 29.

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the foundation of the modern state, Turkey’s army acted as the guarantor of the country’s secular state. The Islamist Erdogan attempted to reverse that, jailing hundreds of military officers on a spurious charge of plotting a coup in 2012. Most were released in 2014. Erdogan could not do without the military, however; his failed foreign policy made him dependent on the Turkish army, which reasserted its influence this year. Erdogan proudly called himself a “black Turk,” that is, a devout Muslim from the Anatolian hinterland, in contrast to the “White Turks,” the Europeanized secular party who came to power under Kemal Ataturk and ruled the country until the 2000s.

The head of a law enforcement advocacy group lashed out at President Barack Obama in the wake of the Dallas shootings that left five police officers dead, accused the president of carrying out a “war on cops.”

“I think [the Obama administration] continued appeasements at the federal level with the Department of Justice, their appeasement of violent criminals, their refusal to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter, actively calling for the death of police officers, that type of thing, all the while blaming police for the problems in this country has led directly to the climate that has made Dallas possible,” William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said in an interview with Fox on Friday morning.

(…)

“It’s a war on cops,” Johnson also said. “And the Obama administration is the Neville Chamberlain of this war.”

“Whenever those of us who are concerned about fairness in the criminal justice system attack police officers, you are doing a disservice to the cause,” Obama said at the Moncola Palace in Madrid.

Obama said that police and activists need to work together and “listen to each other” in order to mobilize real change in America.

The President added that in movements such as Black Lives Matter, there will always be people who make “stupid” or “over generalized” statements, but that a truthful and peaceful tone must be created on both sides for progress.

Og Hillary, der relativerede terrortruslen fra Islamisk Stat et al. med alt, inklusive politibrutalitet kommenterede “White Americans need to do a better job of listening”. Og det, skriver Joel Pollak er “exactly the wrong message. It frames racism as the fundamental problem in American society, and encourages people to interpret events through that lens. It sows seeds of mistrust, when racism had largely been overcome.”

And the answer is that our leaders made a deliberate choice to radicalize our politics, unnecessarily. The racism and mistrust followed, because they are necessary to sustain that radicalism.

The Tea Party arose not because of racism, but because President Barack Obama made clear he was going to push through his agenda regardless of the wishes of the opposition or the constraints of the Constitution, and because voters realized that the Republicans, left to their own devices, were not going to stop him.

The reason Donald Trump exists as a political phenomenon is that there is a sizable constituency of conservatives who are tired of losing to that. They were tired of losing in 2000, too, but Republicans worried at the time about the moderate middle, and so a “compassionate conservative” like George W. Bush was their response.

The left demonized Bush anyway — partly because the 2000 recount convinced them they could, because he was “illegitimate” — and Obama rode that wave to office.

Trump fights back (though his statement about Dallas was remarkably measured, even presidential). The problem is that there is only so much more fighting the country can take. We abuse social media to fantasize about a dystopian America, and in the process we are bringing it about.

[L]et’s go with the Washington Post’s study of police shootings in 2015. The Post found that 990 people, almost all of them men, were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. Before you start calling them victims, however, note that the Post also found that in three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack. That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.

What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)

The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population. Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).

So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%). Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.

Liberals might argue that blacks are disproportionately the victims of unjustified shootings by law enforcement, but I have not seen anyone try seriously to make that case. The Post took a pass at supporting the liberal narrative by arguing that “unarmed” blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites. But the Post failed to note that, according to its own data, blacks are much more likely to attack police officers while unarmed. I don’t know why this is, but in general, I think that unarmed people who assault police officers are likely to be high on drugs.

According to Al-Saqaby, husbands should not immediately attack their wives, but should discipline them ‘properly’ first. He then makes it clear that in marriage, there is nothing like equality, and that men should take charge and rule the home – using violent force if necessary.

In the event of a woman disobeying her husband, Al-Saqaby teaches in the video that the men should follow the steps below in making sure that the woman is corrected.

“The first step is to remind her of your rights and of her duties according to Allah. Then comes the second step – forsaking her in bed. The third step, beating, has to correspond with the necessary Islamic conditions” before taking action. The beating should not be performed with a rod, nor should it be a headband, or a sharp object. Instead, husbands should use a ‘tooth-cleaning twig or with a handkerchief’ to beat their wife. The wife will feel that she was wrong in the way she treated her husband,” says Al-Saqaby.

The Saudi government endorsed doctor says his teachings of how to beat wives is not exhaustive, and that sometimes men should beat their wives without following his steps if the women go to extreme lengths in disobeying their husbands.

He also blamed women for provoking their husbands, expressing shock that some women are ‘stubborn’ to the point that only beatings can bring them back into line.

“In addition, sometimes a woman makes a mistake that may lead her husband to beat her. I’m sad to say there are some women who say ‘Go ahead, if you are a real man, beat me’ She provokes them,” he adds in the video.

Critics of the video say,although some of the teachings Al-Saqaby espoused in the video concerning how husbands should treat their wives are found in the Holy Quran, they were used in a context. They accuse Al-Saqaby and the Saudi government of being selective with the verses of the Holy Book in order to satisfy their own interest.

Let’s start with 2014, the last year for which there are official records. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the police killed 261 whites and 131 blacks. The CDC also found that from 1999 to 2013, the police killed almost twice the number of whites compared to blacks, 3,160 and 1,724, respectively.

Activists promptly note that whites account for nearly 65 percent of the population and that, therefore, one would expect whites to comprise most of those killed by cops. And we are told that blacks, while 13 percent of the population, represent a much greater percentage of those killed by cops. Institutional, systemic, structural racism!

Here’s what those promoting the “police disproportionately kill black people” narrative consistently omit. Whites, despite being almost 65 percent of the population, disproportionately commit less of the nation’s violent crime — 10 percent. Blacks, at 13 percent of the population, disproportionately commit more violent crime. As to murders, black commit nearly half. Yet whites are 50 percent of cop killings.

Criminology professor Peter Moskos looked at the numbers of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 and found that 49 percent were white, while 30 percent were black. “Adjusted for the homicide rate,” says Moskos, “whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.” So if anything, whites have more to complain about than Mr. Williams.

What about traffic stops and race? Surely cops racially profile blacks, wrongly and disproportionately stopping them? Not according to the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice. In its 2013 report, “Race, Trust and Police Legitimacy,” the NIJ found that 75 percent of blacks admitted that they were stopped for “legitimate reasons.” And it turns out blacks disproportionately commit traffic offenses, whether speeding, driving without a license, driving with expired tags, driving without the seat belt on or without a car seat for a baby, and so on. Numerical disparities, said the NIJ, result from “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”

What about 2015, a year in which Black Lives Matter protested a number of high-profile police/black suspect encounters? According to The Washington Post, the police killed 965 people. But the Post found that “white police officers killing unarmed black men represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.” Remember, a black man, extremely popular among blacks, has been president for over seven years. He has nominated, and Congress has approved, back-to-back attorneys general. Nothing stops the Department of Justice from filing civil rights charges against the officers for “murder.” But the DOJ has not done so.

Milton Friedman forewarned in the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Whereas “the argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument.” “The argument for individualism” and freedom, on the other hand, “is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

The EU is circling the wagons, painting Britain as a reluctant European, and seeks to punish her to dissuade other nations from similar actions. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s tart summary reflects this view: “It’s not an amicable divorce, but it never really was a close love affair anyway”.

The intellectual response is framed by cognitive dissonance. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, lamented the fact that the referendum outcome was the result of a complex question being reduced to “absurd simplicity”.

Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University, saw it as “Russian roulette for republics”. He complained that the simple majority of those who voted (36 per cent of eligible voters voted for leaving) was an absurdly low bar – although that level is significantly higher than the average winning vote proportion in recent US presidential elections, for example. Such a significant decision, he said, should not be made without appropriate checks and balance.

And in an editorial for Business Insider, American columnist Josh Barro termed the decision “a tantrum”. British voters had made “a bad choice”. It was an “error of direct democracy”. Such important decisions should not be decided by voters but left to “informed” elected officials.

For those who believe they are born to rule, democracy should be for those who meet some standard set by them with the proviso that the vote coincides with what they think ought to happen. For this group, the Brexit vote signals the need to limit democracy to ensure that important decisions are left to self-certified experts.

It was a system that worked remarkably well for the international upper class. Men and women dedicated to commerce enjoyed unprecedented access to international markets. Activists dedicated to social justice could engineer their societies without ever truly facing the accountability of the ballot box. The logic of the system was self-proving. It would triumph through the sheer force of its virtue.

Unable to grasp the extent to which the new international order had endured and prospered not so much through its self-evident goodness but through the protection of American arms, it proved completely incapable of meeting the challenge when America chose to retreat. Vladimir Putin wanted no part of a system that sidelined Russia and viewed it as just one more economic and bureaucratic entity in a global superstate and decided to exert raw power to shape the world. He put boots on the ground in Crimea, and he dared the world to move him. He exerted his will in Syria, and he dared the world to stop him.

In response, John Kerry actually said, “You just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” It’s a comment that would be hilarious if it weren’t so impotent. Putin did as he liked, and “history” had nothing to say about it.

The part of the referendum campaign that has angered me most is this: the suggestion, repeatedly made by pro-EU persons, that there is something narrow, mean and small-minded about wanting to live in an independent country that makes its own laws and controls its own borders.

I can think of no other country where the elite are so hostile to their own nation, and so contemptuous of it.

I have spent many years trying to work out why this is. I think it is because Britain – the great, free, gentle country it once was and might be again – disproves all their theories.

Most of our governing class, especially in the media, politics and the law, is still enslaved by 1960s ideals that have been discredited everywhere they have been tried.

These are themselves modified versions of the communist notions that first took hold here in the 1930s. But the things they claim to want – personal liberty, freedom of conscience, clean government, equality of opportunity, equality before the law, a compassionate state, a safety net through which none can fall, and a ladder that all can climb – existed here without any of these airy dogmas.

How annoying that an ancient monarchy, encrusted with tradition, Christian in nature, enforced by hanging judges in red robes, had come so much closer to an ideal society than Trotsky or Castro ever did or ever could.

The contradiction made the radicals’ brains fizz and sputter. How could this be? If it was so, they were wrong. Utopians, as George Orwell demonstrated, prefer their visions to reality or truth. Two and two must be made to make five, if it suits them.

So, rather than allow their hearts to lift at the sight of such a success as Britain was, and ashamed to be patriots, they set out to destroy the living proof that they were wrong.

(…)

They declared themselves ‘Europeans’. They regarded this as superior to their own country. ‘How modern! How efficient!’ they trilled. I have heard them do it. They did not notice that the EU was also a secretive, distant and unresponsive monolith, hostile or indifferent to the freedoms we had so carefully created and so doggedly preserved.

They failed to see that its ‘parliament’ does not even have an opposition, that its executive is accountable to nobody. They inherited jury trial, habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights – the greatest guarantees of human freedom on the planet – and they traded in this solid gold for the worthless paper currency of human rights.

If they win on Thursday, the process of abolishing Britain will be complete. If they lose, as I hope they do and still think they will, there is a faint, slender chance that we may get our country back one day.

Children’s worst new lesson in the British political process comes not from the Brexit fiasco but from Steven Spielberg’s live-action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” When the titular Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance) and the little girl, Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), who lives in his lair need the help of the British Army, they visit the Queen (Penelope Wilton), who summons her generals and orders a commando raid on behalf of the beleaguered duo—but before she does so she makes phone calls to two political leaders. She lets “Boris” know that she might need airspace clearance and tells “Nancy” that she needs to talk with “Ronnie.” (“Well, wake him!”) Yet Spielberg offers no sense whatsoever that the British have an elected government and that it’s the Prime Minister’s job, not the monarch’s, to call out the troops.

Maybe Spielberg is just being subtly subversive. It’s easy to imagine a child, after seeing this movie, wondering why—with Great Britain facing a traumatic withdrawal from the European Union and its own possible even-more-traumatic internal breakup into independent countries—the Queen doesn’t just put her foot down and bring an end to this nonsense. And, if Her Majesty (or, as the language-garbling giant says, “Her Majester”) can’t or won’t do so, then why have a monarchy at all?